Valentine's Day Caring for Other's Party

Today, instead of the usual Valentine's Day party, our wonderful room parents planned a "Caring for Others" celebration.  The kids in our class created Valentine's Day art supply kids for the kids living at Hephzibah, an orphanage here in Oak Park.  It was meaningful and fun service project for our class!

This kids also wrote everyone in the class a nice, personalized message saying things they appreciate about each other! 

Enjoy your long, holiday weekend! 

Student Explain Everything Videos: "I'm Learning About Fractions"

To review our first ten fraction lessons, students made videos explaining the concepts using the app Explain Everything.  Here are just a few of the videos the kids made!

Types of Mistakes

“A life spent making mistakes is not only most honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing” – George Bernard Shaw

“It is well to cultivate a friendly feeling towards error, to treat it as a companion inseparable from our lives, as something having a purpose which it truly has.” – Maria Montessori

Article: Why Understanding These Four Types of Mistakes Can Help Us Learn


Video: Mistakes - To Get Better You Have to Get Ugly

Let's make our kids "grittier"!

I love TED Talks!  Here is a great one by Angela Lee Duckworth explaining her research on the what makes people successful.  Parents- take six minutes to watch this interesting talk and work on building grit at home!

Growth Mindset Videos for Parents

Hello Parents!  Take a few moments to watch these great videos about growth mindset and embracing failure. At school I have been noticing fixed mindset comments and attitudes becoming more frequent.  Because of this, we are going to spend some time in class fostering our growth mindsets and learning from our mistakes.  Please help me keep this powerful message going at home.  I will post a few videos these next few weeks for you to watch.  Enjoy!!

I am looking forward to seeing everyone at our conferences in just two weeks from tonight.  Be sure to sign up for a conference on my sign up genius if you have not yet.  You can access and adjust your times if your schedule has change.

What is a Growth Mindset?




Embracing Kids' Failures

Unit 3 Math Test on Monday

We have our Unit 3 Multiplication & Division test coming up on Monday.  Remember that to study for math you have to do problems and check answers.

Here are some review problems we did in class to help prepare.  Use these to help create problems of your own with different numbers.




Here is the study check list again for skills to review and master before Monday.

I LOVE this Student Created Long Division Video

Before break, I had kids create videos of themselves doing a long division problem that they made up.  This is one of my favorites!  I love the cheerful tone, explanations, checks of work and math vocabulary!